Recent years have seen significant steps toward tightening and restricting access to data held by organizations that relates to individuals and consumers, for example personally-identifiable and/or medical information. For instance, state and federal laws increasingly require businesses to implement heightened data security protocols and to provide more frequent notices to individuals when actual or potential security breaches occur. These obligations have become onerous for businesses, and data management costs are a burgeoning concern for IT professionals and executives.
The regulatory steps outlined above arise, at least in part, in response to an increased threat from individuals who seek to steal and misuse personal data. As more personal data is stored by private and governmental organizations with each passing year, criminals become increasingly adept at illegally retrieving and exploiting such information, and at concealing evidence of their crimes. Resulting data management risks reach beyond external “hacking” threats to secure data storage environments. The risks include internal organizational threats posed by employee(s) or others that are regularly granted limited access to secure data, but that may have a concealed motive to exceed such access for personal gain.
Conventional methods for protecting data in a secure storage environment are inadequate for minimizing modern data management risks and associated costs. For example, conventional permission-based access protocols for protecting secure data may fail to provide precise and controlled data flow and presentation of data, leading to increased organizational costs in connection with data breach mitigation and notification efforts. There is therefore a need for an improved system and method for controlling the expression of protected information.